No Picnic
by PragmaticHominid
Summary: After a long absence, Azazel returns to inform Mystique and their young son that he wishes to take them on a picnic for Kurt's 4th birthday. Mystique's misgivings are confirmed when Kurt suddenly disappears during their outing and then fails to reappear.


**No Picnic**

On the morning that Azazel returned from a ten day absence from the Headquarters – an absence that Mystique knew would remain unexplained – he crouched in the hallway before their small son and said to him, "You are big boy now, are you not?"

Kurt nodded solemnly. "I am this many," he told his father, holding up all three fingers of his right hand and an additional finger on the left. "My birthday was yesterday." There was no accusation behind these words; Kurt had an even less clear idea of where Azazel went during his extended disappearances than Mystique did, but he accepted it without complaint. He was a kind child, and sometimes she worried that he was too forgiving for his own good.

"I know this," Azazel said, his voice grave but his pale blue eyes sparkling. "And so, you and your Mama and I, we are going to have a great adventure today." And he scooped the boy up as he straightened, perching him on the crook of his arm. "We are going to have a picnic," he told Kurt, in a tone of greatest confidence.

Azazel turned back to Mystique, holding out his hand to her. She hesitated. "Azazel, we can't... you know that. We'll be seen."

"Don't worry," he told her, which was what he always said; he thought she worried too much – about the direction the Brotherhood was taking, about the boy's health and his mental well-being, about the future. "You will see," Azazel said, and stretched his arm out a little further. Nervously, she took his hand.

By then she had almost gotten used to the sight of the fiery, yellow-hazed land scape that they passed through so quickly when Azazel transported somewhere.

They landed on a mountain ridge that Mystique did not recognize, but which she knew at once was a long, long way from home. The wild grasses under her feet were an almost surreal shade of bright yellow-green, and were dotted with blooming flowers. The beautiful foliage hid treacherously uneven, stoney ground. In the distance, along the uneven plains and peaks of the mountain, she saw juniper and fir trees. Volcanic spires rose around them like altars to pagan gods. The air tasted as though no one else had ever tasted it before.

The sweep of the mountain and the size of the sky would have been quite a lot of freedom for anyone to handle. Kurt, who's experience with open spaces was limited to the brick-walled courtyard of the Brotherhood's Chicago-based headquarters, seemed positively drunk on it. Azazel allowed the boy to slide from his arms, and he stood as though transfixed, mouth hanging open. He was trembling.

He turned his huge smokey eyes toward her, and Mystique saw that they were _glowing _with joy. "It's alright. Go play," she told him, and he shot off like a arrow, bounding and jumping, turning flips in the air and spinning in circles with his arms stretched out, his three-toed feet dancing over the rocky ground on his three-toed feet as easily as a mountain goat kid. "But stay where I can see you," she called after him.

"This is too wonderful," Mystique said to Azazel, as her eyes tracked a brown hawk as it glided across the sky. "Where are we?"

"Călimani Mountains, in Moldavia," he said, and when he saw that this had not done much to clarify the question for her, he added stiffly, "In Romanian Carpathian mountains."

"It is very beautiful."

"Yes," Azazel agreed. "And now I am going to get picnic food," he told her, and then he was gone again.

Mystique moved closer to where Kurt was scaling one of the strange, pointed rock formations. "You're a good climber," she told him, craning her head to watch him as he went higher and higher. The mother in her was frightened to see him so high up – ten and then fifteen and then twenty feet above her head. But the rest of her, which knew better, recognized this precarious agility as an aspect of his mutation. She would not demand that he came down and acted "normal" or that – on a bright and free day like this – he should hide his light under a bushel.

He faltered as he neared the top, feet scrambling against the stone for purchase, his tail whipping wildly. But then he was pulling himself up onto the tip. He sat, crouched on all fours on a rounded space no wider than a bike tire, and his smile seemed to run from one pointed ear to the other. "I did it, Mama," he said.

"I see that," she told him. Behind her, she heard Azazel return with the pleasantly familiar whiff of sulfur. She turned to glanced at him, and saw that he had set a large picnic basket on the ground behind her, and was now busy spreading a red and white checkered blanket across the ground. He looked back at her, then on to Kurt, and from his smile Mystique knew that – whatever else he might be hiding from her – he believed unreservedly that their boy was a wonderment and a source of joy to him.

She turned back to watch Kurt, who was still perched like a king on his castle at the top of the rock, his tail wagging as happily as a puppy's. A moment later she felt Azazel's fingers on the back of her neck, trailing lazily through her hair and then down along the ridges of her spine. She reached around and took his hand. "Be good," she said, holding on to him.

"I am always good," he said softly, so close that she could feel the tickle of his beard against the skin of her ear. "I am so good to you. And you are so good to me."

"Mama, look at me," Kurt called out from above. "Papa – look," he added. "I'm going to do something! Are you watching?"

Mystique was suddenly certain that Kurt intended to jump. She pulled away from Azazel, began to say sharply, "Kurt – no!" but before the words had even began to form on her lips it had happened.

With a great deal of smoke and with a loud _bamf!_ sound Kurt disappeared. Mystique turned, trying to look everywhere at once, trying to find him. Behind her, Azazel disappeared, too. Her reappeared in the sky far above her, and she craned her head to watch him. He seemed to hoover in the air for an instant, scanning the distant horizon, before he began to slip downwards. He transported again, reappearing in nearly the same place but facing a different direction, and again swiftly took in the ground below him. "Can you see him?" Mystique shouted up at Azazel. He didn't answer. He transported again, and this time he did not reappear in the sky again.

He was gone for a full two minutes, a length of time that felt substantially longer longer to Mystique. When he appeared again, Kurt was with him, clinging desperately to Azazel's neck. Mystique ran to them.

Moving carefully, as though he believed that Kurt was made of glass, Azazel attempted to pry his arms from around his neck, to hand him off to Mystique, but Kurt would not let go. His eyes were squeezed tightly shut, and sour-smelling yellow smoke rose from under his closed eyelids and from his mouth. Mystique ran her hands over his back and chest, up and down the length of his arms, trying to ascertain if he'd been hurt. He was too quiet, too still – she wished that he would cry, do anything other than cling to Azazel with that drowning boy's desperate grasp. She should feel his heart pounding against his narrow chest like a panicked bird against the bars of its cage. His tail hung limp as a dead thing.

Finally, he stirred. He lifted his head to look up at Azazel. "Papa?" he said, pain and terror and the desperate hope that maybe – just maybe – he'd be told that it was all alright now all in that single gasped word. Azazel murmured something to him softly in Russian, words that Mystique might have been able to follow if she had not been so laser focused on Kurt. Kurt did start to cry then - racking, gasping sobs that shook his entire small frame, but that for all their violence were sounds of relief; a bad thing had happened but now it was over with, and he was safe enough to be able to cry about it.

Mystique reached for Kurt again and this time he went to her almost frantically, curling his arms around her neck and his legs around her waist and his tail around her wrist, clinging with everything he had as he cried. But he was tired. Whatever he had done, it had wiped him out completely, and within a few minutes he had poured out what small dregs he had left. Before very long he quieted down, drowsing with his forehead against her shoulder. "What happened?" she asked Azazel softly. She ran her fingers through Kurt's tussled hair, telling herself that it was to comfort him but really doing it for herself, to reassure herself that he was there and solid and safe with her.

"He tried to transport himself to the ground, I think," Azazel said, "but once he had gone he was not strong enough to make it back here."

"He was lost," she said, "in the place between?" They'd given no word for the fiery land of smoke and shadows that Azazel past through when he transported himself or others, but she could not help thinking of it as a Hell.

"I found him," Azazel said, as though he wished to put an end to the discussion – it was only then that she began to notice how shaken he'd been by the thing. She didn't ask the question, but it seemed that he read it in her eyes. "I never had such a problem, even when I was a small one." He hesitated, then added, "He should not try that again until he is stronger."

This was the first concession that he had made that everything was not right with Kurt, the first time he had come close to acknowledging that the boy was frail. It did nothing to comfort her. _What's happening to our lives?_ she wondered, frightened by how suddenly and completely helpless she felt; before the boy had been born, she had believed that she was done with helplessness. The future seemed as cloudy and dire as that dread land that Azazel had carried her through so many times, and she could not chart what was coming. "We should go home," she said. "He's exhausted."

But Kurt argued with that, struggling in her arms until she relented and sat him on his feet. "I'm not tired," he told her, with a voice that nonetheless quavered with fatigue. "We're going to have picnic, aren't we? Papa said." He turned to look at Azazel.

Azazel did not even glance at Mystique before shrugging in easy acquiescence. "Go and see what is in the box," he suggested, and Kurt hurried to do just that.

When Azazel looked back at Mystique he saw that her eyes were angry. "I won't break my promise," said he, who had promised her nothing and so never lied.

"If he does that again," she said, trying to catch Azazel, hating herself for it but using the boy as bait to catch him, "and you're not here -"

"Marconi and cheese!" Kurt crowed, holding the dish up over his head like a prize. He sat it carefully on the picnic, then tottered back toward the basket.

She didn't really believe that Kurt would try to transport himself again any time soon – he wasn't a stupid boy – and when Azazel stared back at her she saw that he knew this. Azazel stood, joining Kurt beside the basket. He had not even so much as acknowledged that Mystique had spoken.

"And what else?" he asked Kurt, crouching beside him and peering into the basket. "Look carefully."

Kurt plunged his head into the interior of the basket, hunting for some secret treasure. "Uus Kalev!" he said, emerging with a handful of small candy bars. "Look, Mama – there's chocolate, too!"

He seemed to have forgotten what had happened to him, to have put it aside as easily as an uninteresting toy, and she was glad of that. Azazel was lifting other covered dishes from the basket, things that Kurt had disregarded in his hunt for favored treats. Fried chicken and warm brown bread, fresh cherries and tiny little fruit tarts. A bottle of wine with a French label. He might have visited half a dozen countries just to fill that basket, she thought, but then he had a way of getting exactly what he wanted. In a way that was reassuring; he wouldn't be here with her and Kurt now if there was any other place in the world that he would rather be.

So she went over to them and sat on the blanket beside Kurt, and pretended to be having a good time for his sake while he ate his macaroni and cheese and picked at everything else, and after a little while she found that she no longer needed to pretend. And Azazel told Kurt jokes and stories, switching smoothly from English to a nursery Russian which Mystique was pleasantly astounded to find that she had very little trouble following, and before long Kurt was dozing easily in her lap, Soviet chocolate smeared across his fuzzy face.

Despite – or maybe in some strange way, because of - the bad scare they had all had, it was still a wonderful day. Looking back later, she would believe that even then she had known that days like these were numbered.


End file.
